The Face in the Cloth

Seven days ago, in the morning, drinking coffee in the studio, looking at what I'd painted the day before, wondering what the new day would bring, whether the quail would appear, if the bobcat would follow, if the come-and-go fog would last until noon, if a trip to the market was needed or if, a thought much more satisfying as the sea breeze flipped cottonwood leaves yellow to blue in the breaking sun and lulled me with hopes that I could stay home all day, not shave, and continue working on questions of line and color the solution of which once solved, might lead to other similar questions for the same moment tomorrow, I noticed to my amazement an image at the far end of the room which fully woke me, sat me up straight, and held my gaze immobile for its appearance and its clarity. It seemed to come out of no where. I saw a face in the folds of a cloth laying over stacked boxes and canvasses.

The face, still there, I only found the nerve to photograph it this morning, is in profile. It is angular, as if sculpted, rough cut but sharp in stone, and the ochre dyed cotton duck on which the face is seen in dimension is transformed into a golden, opaque marble. The eyes of the face are heavy lidded, deep set and at first appear to be closed over boney, sunken cheeks, but they are half closed, and the shaded pupils look out as if in meditation concentrated both on what might be seen behind the eyes, as well as into a great distance beyond them. Whatever the face may be looking at, or not, seems not unpleasant. It is calm. The nose is large and hawkish, the nose is an axe. The small mouth is closed and set without rigidity. The chin is small but well formed and strong. The face in the cloth is handsome, it suggests androgyny tipped to the masculine. It is Romantic. It is a face that could have been drawn by Girodet or Géricault, it could have been a study of Napoleon for Baron Gros's painting of him crossing the Alps. It looks like Delacroix's Portrait of Chopin.

The expression on the face is one of repose, or death. And with my attempt to paint Elstir's "eclipses of perspective" on the wall, and his "completely circular castle" still on the easel resembling, in its present unfinished state, not the "exceptional purity of the atmosphere on a fine day" which delighted that artist, but rather the dark black round antique hand grenades thrown by anarchists and once used by cartoonists to great effect, I cannot help but think that the face resembles, imagination perhaps running wild, not the Shroud of Turin about which I know nothing, but Manray's photograph, and Helleu's drawing of Marcel Proust, on his deathbed. But shaved.